


Echoes of Words We've Never Said

by imagined_melody



Category: Shameless (US)
Genre: Ableist Language, Angst, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Hurt/Comfort, I Love You, M/M, Sickfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-23
Updated: 2014-12-23
Packaged: 2018-03-03 00:55:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,314
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2832314
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imagined_melody/pseuds/imagined_melody
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A series of times the words "I love you" hung in the air, unsaid, or spoken louder with actions than words.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Echoes of Words We've Never Said

**Author's Note:**

  * For [somesecretstoshare](https://archiveofourown.org/users/somesecretstoshare/gifts).



> I haven't written in literally MONTHS, but this year I participated in the first ever _Shameless_ Secret Santa gift exchange. I wrote this fic for the prompt "Gallavich, every day domestic." There are four vignettes connected by a common theme, but taking place an indeterminate length of time apart. 
> 
> Note: because of the fact that I was listening to [this Ian/Mickey playlist](http://8tracks.com/abethclaire/let-us-be-brave) while I finished the fic, the song that's playing at the end is [this song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBKT7YsQZfo), in case you want to cue it up while you read. :)

Mickey wakes up, slowly, to the sound of water running in the bathroom. The covers are bunched up between them—Ian’s body temperature runs hotter than his, so most of the blankets usually end up on his side—and there’s a warm imprint in the mattress where the other boy used to be. It takes Mickey a second to realize what the faint sound coming from behind the closed door is:

Ian is singing in the shower.

It’s muffled by the constant drone of the water’s spray, and quiet so as not to disturb the rest of the house. But Ian’s mumbling the words to some Taylor Swift song, soft and casual as anything. His voice is surprisingly melodic. Mickey finds himself listening closer, despite himself.

 _I fucking love you_ , he thinks, all of a sudden, without even meaning to. The words sit there and weigh on him for a moment. It’s like a flash of icy cold, the panic he’s always felt about things that were _too gay_ welling up in him before he remembers how much things have changed since those days—how much less he has to be afraid of now.

He climbs out of bed and steps into the bathroom, the warm air enveloping him. “Close the door, you’ll let the heat out,” Ian whines, so Mickey pushes the door shut and toes off his socks, then pulls off the rest of his clothes and dumps them in a pile on the floor. (Ian’s are closer to the edge of the shower, and he nudges them further away with his foot; they’ll get all wet if he leaves them there, the way Ian gets water everywhere when he dries himself off.) When he gets under the spray, Ian grins and immediately brackets him against the wall with his body.

“”Cause I got a blank space, baby, and I’ll write your name,” Ian near-hums against Mickey’s neck, punctuating it with a little nip to his throat. He smells like body wash and toothpaste, where his breath washes over Mickey’s face as he pulls away.

The thought crosses Mickey’s mind again, but he doesn’t pay it much attention. He’s got other things to think about now.

~*~*~*~*~*~

He’s just gotten home from work, and Mickey hears it before he even walks in the door: Yevgeny is crying.

No. That’s the understatement of the fucking century. Yevgeny is _screaming._

He storms into the house, half pissed as hell and half—despite himself—concerned about what’s got his son so worked up. It isn’t hard to find the source of the sound: Yevgeny is wailing his little head off in the living room, cradled against Ian’s shoulder as the younger boy rocks him gently.

“The fuck’s wrong with him?” Mickey says, surprised by how his voice comes out—edgy and worried, not annoyed like he’d expected it to be.

“Fever.” Ian’s eyes are tired, but he keeps moving slowly back and forth, palm rubbing against the fussy child’s back. “Not a high one. He’ll be OK. I was just gonna give him a bath, see if it calms him down.”

Judging by his obvious weariness, it won’t be the first thing Ian’s tried. “How long’s he been crying for?”

“ _Forever_ ,” Mandy hollers from the kitchen.

Ian rolls his eyes weakly. “He’s just uncomfortable,” he explains in a much quieter voice. “He’ll wear himself out eventually.”

In the bathroom, when Ian attempts to put Yevgeny down so he can get the bath ready, the baby’s shrieks only intensify. Ian shushes him, and there’s a minute where he struggles to balance the squirmy kid in one hand and prep the water with the other, before Mickey takes pity on him and blurts out: “Give him here.”

Ian blinks at him. “Mickey, are you—“

Now it’s Mickey’s turn to roll his eyes as he repeats, “Just give me the fucking kid, Gallagher.” Because yeah, sure, he’s not so keen on the idea of being a dad, and he’s hardly ever thrilled at having to hold the damn baby. But he’s not gonna stand here and get in the way while Ian does all the work. Not when Ian looks like he’s been stuck with the kid all day already.

Yevgeny does feel warm when Ian places him in Mickey’s arms. Mickey doesn’t know how to do that soothing thing Ian does, but he keeps the baby tucked into the join of his neck and shoulder while Ian runs a little lukewarm water in the tub and strips down to his boxers and undershirt. When Ian reaches out and takes Yevgeny back, Mickey can still feel the residual warmth from where Yev’s body had been resting against his chest. It pulls at something inside him, a weird burst of feeling he hasn’t yet been able to explain.

Once he’s removed the baby’s clothes as well, Ian steps into the tub with him. Sure enough, the bath does something right: in five or ten minutes Yevgeny is still giving little hiccupping sobs, but his eyes are looking heavier and he seems less distressed. Ian runs his damp hand over the boy’s forehead, letting the water cool down his face while his little body kicks and wiggles. Mickey doesn’t know what to do to help, so he picks up the discarded clothes and throws them awkwardly in the clothes pile outside the door. Ian gives him a small smile. “Can you get the baby Tylenol from the kitchen?” he asks, and Mickey does, secretly grateful to have something to do.

Yevgeny falls asleep while Ian is drying him off, so Ian just diapers him and then wraps him up snugly in the fluffy white towel, cuddling him close to his body once again. The newfound quiet is a welcome sound, and Ian finally sags against the closed bathroom door, eyes fluttering shut in relief. He looks so exhausted, and it occurs to Mickey that in addition to shaking his ass at the clubs in Boystown for tips each night, Ian has just spent all day caring for Mickey’s sick, screaming kid while he and Svetlana were at work. There’s no one else in the house who could’ve done that.

Suddenly and fiercely, Mickey doesn’t know what he’d do without Ian Gallagher.

 _I really fucking love you_ , he thinks, and the part that curses himself for thinking it is overshadowed by the part that knows none of this—none of the little fucked-up interlocking parts of his whole life—would work without Ian. And that’s bigger than any stupid hangups he has about being in love.

The words still don’t leave his mouth, though. Just because he feels them doesn’t mean he can say them. He feels like they’d sit wrong on his tongue if he tried to speak them aloud, so he doesn’t try.

They fall asleep together on the bed, Yevgeny still swaddled in the towel between them. 

~*~*~*~*~*~

It never gets easier, when Ian has to go in to the hospital. No matter how many times it happens.

Sometimes Mickey thinks that if they could just get Ian the care he needs—if they could afford better meds, or a decent therapist or something, maybe he wouldn’t have to be admitted. His highs maybe wouldn’t be so high then, or his lows so low. They could keep him at home, with them, like Mickey had insisted on from the beginning.

Fiona says you can’t “fix” Ian like that; treatments help, but they don’t make people’s problems just go away. This might happen anyway, she says. This might just be the reality that Ian has to deal with, and that they all have to accept.

Mickey’s never cared much for those kinds of realities.

He doesn’t much care for the hospital either. Though the staff is friendly enough and the aesthetic is decent, every time he visits he still feels like he’s going to prison. None of the comforting shit they’ve put in is enough to mask the institutional elements. And sure, it’s not like some maximum-security psych ward or anything. But it’s not home either. 

The first time he came home from the ward, Ian had said it felt alien, like he’d been beamed up in a spaceship, with all the bright fluorescent lights and the sterile air. He might have just been trying to make light of the experience, some kind of coping mechanism. But Mickey reasons he was also pretty out of it when he went in the first time. And that’s _his, Mickey’s,_ fault, he knows. Because he waited until Ian had near-overdosed before letting Fiona and the rest of the Gallaghers take him to inpatient. In the delirium of coming out of the drugs, it stood to reason the place _would_ look like a fucking UFO spaceship to Ian. 

Ian looks like he’s barely holding it together when Mickey sits down next to him today—but “barely holding it together” is an improvement. He’s out of bed, after all, sitting in a chair and responding to their conversation and doing all the eating and sleeping he needs to do, according to the doctor they spoke to on the way in. But he looks so damn fragile, and it makes Mickey’s insides feel like tissue paper to see him like that.

They talk for a while before Ian says it. “You know, the first time I got like this, I hated myself so much.” Mickey presses his lips together, but listens against his will. “You’d just come out in front of your dad like some kinda hero, and you needed me, and I just _shut down_. I knew I should be there for you but I just couldn’t push through. Couldn’t understand _why_ I couldn’t do it. I made you do something you didn’t wanna do, and then I wasn’t there for you.”

None of what he’s saying is news to Mickey. They have this conversation every time Ian is admitted. Mickey doesn’t know if Ian’s too out of it to remember that they do this each time, or if he knows and just doesn’t care about repeating himself. He’s thought about shutting Gallagher up by telling him he’s heard all this before, but when he’d complained about it to the doctor after the second or third time Ian had told him, the man had advised against it. “When people are at their most vulnerable, a lot of times they’ll say things they wouldn’t otherwise,” he’d said. “If he’s telling you this over and over again, it must be really important to him that you know it. Just listen. Let him say it.”

So he waits until Ian’s finished talking all about how terrible he thinks he was to Mickey before saying, “None of that’s your fucking fault, Gallagher, and you know that.” It’s harsh, and Ian flinches at it, but if Ian gets to say what he thinks is the truth right now, then so does Mickey, goddamnit. 

“I let you down,” Ian says weakly.

“No you didn’t,” Mickey reminds, as gently as he knows how. He can’t be his normal caustic self around Ian, not when he’s like this. He doesn’t want the boy to break, after all. Not when he already looks like he’s trying not to self-destruct. “Just…just cut that shit out, OK?” He doesn’t know what to say. Because some of what Ian’s worried about is really legitimately sucky shit, but it’s not shit they could’ve done anything about. Things are what they are. They got past it, and they always will.

Ian wants to know all about the everyday stuff that’s happened at home. He always does. But Mickey always waits for him to ask about it first. He shows Ian photos of Yevgeny’s Halloween costume on his phone, and talks about how Iggy accidentally broke a bunch of dishes the week before. He tells Ian how Svetlana has been letting all the other girls at the Alibi come over and shower at their place, using up all the hot water. “Haven’t had a hot shower in like ten days, man,” he says ruefully. 

All the while, Ian looks at him. And what Mickey sees on his face is as clear as if he were saying the words out loud: _I fucking love you_. It’s overwhelming, and Mickey doesn’t know what to do with it, seeing that reflected back at him. So he just keeps talking until Ian looks like he needs to rest. Then maybe those words won’t slip out of his own mouth.

~*~*~*~*~*~

The words finally slip out, completely unbidden, when he’s watching Ian make coffee one morning. Ian’s wearing sweats and his hair’s sticking up at a weird angle on one side where he slept on it funny. In the other room, Mickey’s brothers are playing with Yevgeny, chasing him around while Svetlana swears at them and Mandy laughs from the couch where she’s eating breakfast. The air smells like cigarette smoke (although Ian’s been trying to get everyone to quit because of Yevgeny) and another kind of stale burning smell—the one that tells him Mandy over-toasted her bread again. Ian’s ipod is playing music while he makes breakfast, the kind of trash they probably play in the clubs, and that might be the gayest thing about this whole situation.

But Mickey can’t help it. He just blurts it out. “I fucking love you, Ian.”

Ian stops, a small smile on his face. He doesn’t look up for a moment, nor does he say anything. Then he turns off the burner on the stove, puts down the spatula, and backs Mickey gently into the wall.

Mickey lied. Making out with his boyfriend while the beat of the dance music plays around them is the gayest thing about this morning. But with Ian pressed against him, he can’t seem to fucking care about a single other thing.

**Author's Note:**

> Happy Holidays, fellow _Shameless_ fans!


End file.
